Knowing How and When Customers Engage and Interact is Critical to Staying Ahead of the Competition

Alan Fackler

As of today, businesses have 129 days and counting until Black Friday, which takes place on November 23rd. This is a make-or-break date for many retailers, particularly online entities, who will be counting on the revenue from this massive day of commerce to keep the ship afloat as it sails towards the horizons of new yearly sales. Anticipating this event beforehand – as well as many other holiday sales events that happen after – is critical. We’ve seen businesses make the difficult decision to close their doors due to poor Black Friday performance – which, we’ve come to learn, is almost always a result of two things: poor planning, and & a poor understanding of metrics.

At Interana, we’ve come to agree collectively on a few fundamental passions that helped shape our business – the robustness of being able to see 100% of your data to make the most informed decisions possible, the power of asking unlimited and unbounded questions, and the ability to give every employee that power whenever they have questions.

We would love an opportunity to show you and your business how you can start planning now, Christmas in July, by deploying the Interana platform to gear up for Black Friday, and the ever-important subsequent holiday season sales. It’s time to start now.

Interana is a platform of unlimited questions. No PhD required.

Interana, at its core, is a platform designed to help you understand what your customers do at every swipe, click, view, share, and purchase. Using Interana, any employee within your company can ask an infinite amount of questions about your customers journey, and get answers in seconds. With an easy-to-use-and-understand graphical interface, our platform doesn’t require data scientists and developers to produce reports that can often take months to deliver – every employee can utilize Interana to learn more about specific customer interactions, that suit the needs of their specific business functions.

From product innovation to customer success to engineering, various teams across the company ask specific questions that are vital to their teams’ success. This possibility, especially when it comes to massive promotional sales like Black Friday, lends itself tremendously across the entire company to help determine exactly the types of promotions and product offerings that should be featured – all based on specific questions and historical data. And, teams can know what works and what doesn’t in real time, giving them the ability to make changes on the fly, and also perform A/B testing in various regions throughout the country/world.

To save some time, here are some brief stats to give you a general idea of how businesses have used our platform to make critical decisions:

Interana helps users understand what customers do at every click, swipe and view – where are customers clicking? Where’d they come from, and where did they go after their online experience? A near-endless amount of data points can be broken down, analyzed, and used for comparison purposes.

Interana can obtain query results from 100% of your data sourced from trillions of customer actions and interactions in seconds.

Interana wants to answer every question you have, and realizes that questions often lead to more questions. So ask an unlimited amount of questions about every aspect of your event data.

November is closer than you think, and Interana is here to help you.

Deploy now and see the results as you promote your business

Let’s put it simply: making the best sales decisions means relying on knowing (not guessing) – if your business considers Black Friday to be a big day for commerce, then it’s time to start thinking about sales and promotions right now. You can take it from us, Black Friday can be a make-or-break holiday sale for many businesses as brands compete for mindshare now more than ever before.

The good news is,129 days is plenty of time to “stand up” your platform of unlimited questions in time for the big sale – tweaking and altering settings and questions, adjusting parameters and planning for problems, troubleshooting issues that prevent optimal customer experiences, beating the ever-looming, IT “code freeze” – these are all critical considerations that need to be made in advance, before executing to the fullest extent when the big day (or week) finally arrives. But, the time to start is now – waiting until the fall might be too late.

If every retailer knew how to look ahead, well, every retailer would, right? Fact is, consolidating all the necessary data (across all relevant web channels, mind you) is a massive part of getting this done, and is also a tremendously complex undertaking without help from a very robust platform. Interana can help bolster your brand pieces from each disparate data stream covering your entire business – be it via e-mail, customer service calls, social media platforms, in-store purchases, and more. Consolidate your business, across channels, into a single entity, and view all cross-platform data from a single place. Understand what happens across each channel to get a complete view of your customers’ behaviors – every turn, swipe, click, call is documented, helping retailers maximize value for their customers.

You want your customers to shop in a way that is easiest for them, and Interana is designed to consolidate each of these data streams into a simple, easy-to-understand, uniform place for all data. The more you’ve gathered, the more specific questions you can ask to learn even more about your customers’ habits. Forget about pulling data from your Customer Engagement System, combining it with sales data from your online store and the countless other moving parts of the internet that determine your metrics – part of efficiently looking ahead is having all of your data in a single, easy to access place. The ultimate goal? Knowing every action your customers take, at every turn.

Deploying Interana today means you can immediately:

Establish and measure customer journeys across an unlimited amount of channels.

Test theories, conjectures, and assumptions.

Group, compare, and contrast user actions and transactions.

Troubleshoot issues.

Inspect unexpected data at any time, and for any reason.

Ease of use

Our integrations are measured in days, not weeks or months, and doesn’t require any legwork from your IT or engineering teams. We host our platform in your own virtual private cloud, ensuring that your data is secure – preventing long cycles with legal and procurement teams. Finally, our very cultural ideals mean we’ve got your back – have questions for us? We’re happy to help you define and understand your metrics, and the platform itself. We’re here to help!

Why wait?

Interana is the only platform that makes it possible for anyone to ask unbounded questions and get answers from all of your raw, disparate, complex data. Interana consolidates that dataset into a frame of event-based reference, so employees can find answers about specific and trending customer interactions across a virtually unlimited timeline, in real-time. Being able to integrate and deploy in mere days means that IT involvement is minimal – with Interana’s managed service, we help deploy, define measurement, and get users started in just a few days.

It’s July, sure, but the holiday season is right around the corner. Be ready.